It has always seemed to me that the problem with cool is ontological. To ask what is cool? is to place oneself in the same quixotic category as those who ask what is truth? or what is beauty?,worthy questions, but ones destined to collapse under the weight of their own self-consciousness. Cool is the most mercurial of cultural states, not unlike what Roland Barthes once said of myth: it exists to the extent that it is believed in, and it evaporates the moment it is explained.
I was reminded of this years ago, in a basement bar in Kreuzberg, where I had gone ostensibly to interview a DJ, but in truth to avoid the stultifying academic conference I was meant to be attending up the road. The DJ in question,an émigré from São Paulo with an encyclopaedic knowledge of French structuralism,looked me in the eye and declared, “Cool is the refusal to flinch.” He then proceeded to spill beer down his vintage Comme des Garçons shirt and not acknowledge it. And for a brief moment, I believed him.
Cool has always been about refusal. Think of Miles Davis, sunglasses in near-darkness, back turned to the audience as if to say, your gaze cannot touch me. Think of James Dean, smouldering against the backdrop of post-war conformity. Think of David Bowie, who,more than anyone,reminded us that cool could be constructed, demolished, and reassembled with every album sleeve. But refusal is never enough; cool also requires recognition. Without the hungry eyes of others, the refusal falls into obscurity.
The paradox, then, is that cool exists in a state of perpetual tension: between effort and effortlessness, visibility and withdrawal, performance and accident. It is not a fixed quality but a relation, a dance, even a duel. Susan Sontag, in her essay on camp, suggested that seriousness and frivolity can coexist in the same gesture. I would extend this to cool: the moment we decide something is cool, we are half in awe of it and half mocking ourselves for caring.
When politicians reach for cool, the results are often comic. One remembers Harold Wilson puffing his pipe in what was supposed to be a gesture of working-class authenticity, or Tony Blair grinning beside Noel Gallagher as though Oasis had been waiting all along to validate neoliberalism. Angela Merkel never bothered, which may be why she remains oddly untouched by ridicule. Cool, I think, is allergic to overt power; it thrives only on the margins.
Technology has, of course, accelerated the life cycle of cool beyond recognition. Where once the jazz club or the nightclub could incubate style for months, even years, now TikTok reduces every gesture to a fleeting meme. I have seen teenagers declare an item of clothing cool, kill it through ubiquity, and bury it in irony all in the space of a fortnight. In this sense, the internet is not a curator of cool but its embalmer. Baudrillard would no doubt have had a field day.
And yet,despite the acceleration, despite the irony,we still pursue it. Why? Perhaps because, as Walter Benjamin suggested of aura, cool reminds us of presence, of uniqueness, of being in a particular place at a particular time. To witness cool is to be part of a tiny conspiracy with others: to say, “we saw it, we felt it, we were there.”
I return, finally, to something the Japanese designer Yohiro Tanaka once told me in Tokyo: “Cool is the absence of sweat.” I laughed at the time, but the line has never left me. It speaks to that strange paradox of effortlessness,the countless hours behind every ‘spontaneous’ move, the artifice behind every ‘natural’ performance. Cool is not authenticity but the appearance of authenticity, staged so deftly that even sceptics (and cultural commentators) are seduced.
In the end, cool may be less about style, fashion, or sound than about connection. The neighbour singing Puccini on her balcony during lockdown was cool. The teenager who resurrects an obsolete dance move in defiance of trend cycles is cool. Even the shy glance across a crowded room,shared recognition, fleeting solidarity,is cool.
To call something cool is simply to say: I wish I could be inside that moment with you. And perhaps that is why, even in our endlessly mediated, algorithmic world, we still need it. Because cool, for all its slipperiness, is really just another word for longing. And longing, as Proust knew, is the only state that never goes out of fashion.
